Flash: Building the Interactive Web

Flash

Platform Studies

Nick Montfort, Ian Bogost

Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, 2009

Codename Revolution: The Nintendo Wii Platform, Steven E. Jones and George K. Thiruvathukal, 2012

The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga, Jimmy Maher, 2012

Flash: Building the Interactive Web, Anastasia Salter and John Murray, 2014

Positive Computing: Technology for a Better World, Rafael A. Calvo and Dorian Peters, 2014

Flash

Building the Interactive Web

Anastasia Salter, John Murray

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2014 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Salter, Anastasia, 1984–

Flash: building the interactive web / Anastasia Salter and John Murray.

pages cm.—(Platform studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-262-02802-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-262-32578-3 (retail e-book)

1. Flash (Computer file) 2. World Wide Web. 3. Multimedia communications—Computer programs. I. Murray, John, 1986– II. Title.

006.7'8—dc23

2014003874

d_r1

Contents

Series Foreward

Acknowledgements

1   Flash and You

2   Animating the Web

3   Platform/er Programming

4   The Web Arcade

5   New Media Art

6   Free and Open?

7   Flash and the Future

Appendix: An Interview with Jonathan Gay

Works Cited

Index

Series Foreword

How can someone create a breakthrough game for a mobile phone or a compelling work of art for an immersive 3D environment without understanding that the mobile phone and the 3D environment are different sorts of computing platforms? The best artists, writers, programmers, and designers are well aware of how certain platforms facilitate certain types of computational expression and innovation. Likewise, computer science and engineering has long considered how underlying computing systems can be analyzed and improved. As important as scientific and engineering approaches are, and as significant as work by creative artists has been, there is also much to be learned from the sustained, intensive, humanistic study of digital media. We believe it is time for humanists to seriously consider the lowest level of computing systems, to understand their relationship to culture and creativity.

The Platform Studies book series has been established to promote the investigation of underlying computing systems and how they enable, constrain, shape, and support the creative work that is done on them. The series investigates the foundations of digital media—the computing systems, both hardware and software, that developers and users depend upon for artistic, literary, and gaming development. Books in the series will certainly vary in their approaches, but they will all also share certain features:

• A focus on a single platform or a closely related family of platforms.

• Technical rigor and in-depth investigation of how computing technologies work.

• An awareness of and discussion of how computing platforms exist in a context of culture and society, being developed based on cultural concepts and then contributing to culture in a variety of ways—for instance, by affecting how people perceive computing.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Adobe and the Flash developer community, whose incredible documentation and resources make studying a platform of this magnitude even possible.

This book exists thanks to Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, editors of the Platform Studies series, and our editor Doug Sery. We benefited from the stories and insight of many people who’ve worked with and on Flash throughout the years, including Jonathan Gay, Jason Nelson, Stuart Moulthrop, Jason Scott, Arno Gourdol and Carlos Ulloa. Our colleagues and mentors at the University of Baltimore, University of California Santa Cruz, University of Maryland, Georgetown University, and beyond have all provided inspiration and support throughout this project: to name only a few, thanks to Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Michael Mateas, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Bridget Blodgett, Kathryn Summers, Deb Kohl, Aaron Reed, Jacob Garbe, Duncan Bowsman, and Jim Whitehead.

Screenshots throughout appear thanks to the generosity of their owners:

Figure 2.1: Lil’ Pimp, feature-length Flash production, 2005, Mark Brooks

Figure 2.2: Breakup Girl, 1999, Lynn Harris and Chris Kalb

Figure 4.1: Alien Hominid, 2002, Tom Fulp

Figure 4.2: Pico’s School, 2006, Tom Fulp

Figure 5.1: I wish I were the Moon, 2008, Daniel Benmergui

Figure 5.2: Pax, 2003, Stuart Moulthrop

Figure 5.3: The Company of Myself, 2009, Eli Piilonen

Figure 7.1: Phone Story, 2011, Paolo Pedercini

1

Flash and You

Introduction

The cover of the 2006 Time magazine Person of the Year issue featured a glossy, reflective image of a personal computer screen with the controls of a web video at the bottom of a monitor under the bold-faced word: You. A provocative headline below reinforced the message: Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world. The article proclaimed the reliance of the web on a broad population of content makers motivated by passion while working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game (Grossman 2006). According to Time, we’d entered the era of the LOLcat and i can haz cheezburger; the age of the YouTube dance sensation and the amateur music video parody; the year of the blogger and the Wikipedia editor. This Information Age brought with it web 2.0 and heightened expectations of interactivity from web-based media. Clay Shirky observed that these new activities were this generation’s outlet for a cognitive surplus of incredible collective power: a surplus of mental energy once reserved for the consumption of television or gin but now turned toward production (Shirky 2011). With this revolution came new attention to amateur works and the apparent overthrow of traditional models of publishing, thanks in part to new accessible distribution channels. This new web appeared to be inherently democratic, with every voice given an equal opportunity to reach a broad audience: however, any such equality of entry is an illusion, and even the apparent ease of access owes more to the platforms shaping the web than anything inherent in the network. Time credited networks such as YouTube and Facebook with providing the tools of this revolution, but ignored the underlying technologies that empowered amateur creation—and the role those platforms played in determining what types of content would be the stickiest and easiest to create by newcomers.

As traditionally defined, a platform is a foundation from which ideas and ideologies are launched. In software studies, Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort define a platform as a hardware or software system that provides the foundation of computational expression (Montfort and Bogost 2009). Some platforms appear self-contained: a Nintendo game console, for instance, has a set configuration and manufacturer whose particular rules govern the system’s potential. Personal computers vary more wildly in their capabilities thanks to the amalgamation of hardware and the range of operating system choices and software that extend their core functionality. Those capabilities might be termed affordances—a term used by Donald Norman to describe the actual and perceived properties of a thing, whether that thing is a piece of hardware or software or simply a pencil (Norman 1988). This term, which can be used in many ways, is helpful in examining platforms as foundations that offer certain possibilities and in doing so shape the creative works they underlie. Affordances are not just properties of a platform: they become suggestions and frameworks for the works built upon them. When examining the web (and particularly the participatory, you-driven web 2.0), a number of different platforms and affordances are at work that are impossible to isolate—and their various affordances have fundamentally shaped the web as a space of discourse, creativity, and interactivity.

The web itself—web 1.0, to some—relies on an agreed language foundation, HTML, for its structure. HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, was first released in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee as part of the architecture of the World Wide Web (Berners-Lee 1994). That initial set of markup has morphed and evolved over the years as new versions and standardizations of key features made their way into the growing number of web browsers. Classic HTML was static as far as the user was concerned: its affordances were minimal, and early websites reflected strong restrictions on content types that corresponded with low bandwidth on early dial-up connections. Instead of the modern capabilities that rival desktop applications, early HTML provided a means to link files: the hyperlink offers a way either to move between documents on the web or between nodes within a page. When combined with other web technologies, HTML acts as both a skeleton and a lingua franca for more sophisticated display of content. The addition of CSS, or cascading style sheets, separates format from the structure provided by HTML. HTML originally mixed the two, including the infamous blink tag as other tags evolved haphazardly through differing support by browsers, before the expectations of web content demanded formatting and structure well beyond those foundational capabilities. Adding interactivity beyond a link-based graph structure was more complicated; it required using additional scripting languages, or different integrated web platforms, to interpret and make the content responsive.

Among this tangled web of platforms, one stands out as a driving force of the you revolution and web interactivity. An Internet user loading up YouTube or an online game in 2006 would likely be launching Adobe Flash Player, one of the options for adding self-contained multimedia or interactive content to a website. Adobe Flash Player is a browser extension that offered a browser-based environment with affordances well beyond the traditional web, extending the palette of online content capabilities dramatically over the years. Users of Flash Player might not even notice their reliance on Flash as, once installed, it became a fairly seamless part of the browsing experience. Flash is a multimedia platform that started as a simple animation package and grew to offer an incredible range of opportunities to author media experiences on the web. Gaming magazine Edge pointed out that Flash and the communities it inspired were at the real forefront of participatory culture, even if sites like YouTube were getting all the credit (Edge Staff 2007). Flash game developers cite the platform’s accessibility and ease of quick prototyping for artists and the friendliness of its design that allows amateur creators to experiment. In 2005, just before Time announced the year of the amateur content creator, Lev Manovich declared that Generation Flash had emerged: a new class of media artists that writes its own software code to create their own cultural systems, instead of using samples of commercial media (Manovich 2005). He noted that this generation did not necessarily have to use Flash to be part of this movement, but were instead characterized by what he considered Flash aesthetics: a style that could be translated to Shockwave, DHTML, Quicktime, and many other competing platforms for web multimedia. These other tools have some of the capabilities of Flash: animation, games, and dynamic, responsive web sites. These qualities are not exclusively the domain of Flash. But Flash’s contributions, especially as a unified platform, set expectations for web content so high that the name of the platform is embedded in the aesthetic, and Manovich’s generation of content-creators and artistic innovators could be rightly labeled as products of the Flash platform—a platform that itself emerged ten years before his writing, and with a very different set of affordances. This convergence of people and platform recalls Marshall McLuhan’s often quoted (and often misused) concept: the medium is the message (McLuhan 1964). As McLuhan unpacks the concept, This is merely to say that the personal social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology. Generation Flash is a prime representation of this consequence of extension. The scale of self-amplification and creation that Flash enables likewise amplified the web.

Positioning Flash: A Brief History

Flash began its life as SmartSketch, a software program that evolved from a tablet drawing program into an animation tool. The program’s evolution reflected the search for the problem that Flash was solving: the delivery of dynamic content, not just static pages, over the web. In our interview in 2012, Flash creator Jonathan Gay recounts how the project evolved (see the appendix):

The main constraint was our time and not understanding what the problem was. Do we put sound in the first version, what kind of features? Initially we built a drawing package that influenced a lot of things, but wasn’t a product for the Internet. And then we said, well, we have drawing, let’s add animation to it. There weren’t a ton of choices, it was more gradual: How do we build it, what do we put in it next? What’s the most important thing: what do we build next?

After retooling and refocusing its efforts for web-based distribution, FutureWave Software released FutureSplash Animator on August 19, 1996. Among its high-profile initial clients were Disney and Microsoft, both choosing FutureSplash for its ability to deliver TV-like graphics with small file sizes (Allbusiness.com 1996) for their respective web launches. After four years and a $500,000 investment by its founders, FutureWave was acquired by Macromedia only a few months after the release in December 1996, bringing it to the attention of the wider technical market. With this came the change of the product name that shortened the wordy title to Macromedia Flash 1.0.

The packaging of FutureSplash proclaimed it a complete web site graphics tool, emphasizing the origins of SmartSketch and not yet acknowledging how the product would come to dominate its bigger brothers. The slogan suggested limitations to animated banner ads and a snazzier version of the Under Construction images that were everywhere on the young web as virtual homesteaders figured out how to colonize the media space. The purchase by Macromedia added additional complexity to FutureSplash’s identity, as Macromedia Director 5’s inclusion of an option to export to Shockwave, a format similar to Flash, made it a viable platform for creating web-based animation and interaction. Director had a long history as a multimedia editing platform, starting out as MacroMind VideoWorks with very limited graphic capabilities in the 1980s. MacroMind’s founder and leader up to the merger with Macromedia in 1991, Marc Canter, explained the vision that drove his software design: Because we had a direct connection to the animators, designers and musicians who were using our tools, we knew exactly what features and capabilities they needed . . . One thing we knew—that the world needed end-user ‘tools’ that could be used by artists, musicians and designers—to create this ‘stuff’—this combination of graphics, text, music and interactivity that we knew was possible (Canter 2003). Director’s capabilities, however, were formulated for delivery over CD-ROM, whereas Flash would flourish in its newfound home across the web.

At the time of Flash’s acquisition by Macromedia, Director and Flash were competitors with more than a few similarities. Even so, Flash’s early adaptations were in response to the needs of the web. Director’s powerful capabilities translated into higher download times and a greater bulk in the Shockwave extension, while Flash was more limited but optimized. These optimizations built on key goals set by the team early on, giving Flash an edge in the race to play content. The creative metaphors of Flash and Director show a strong parallel, although Flash’s did not extend nearly as far into the moviemaking aspects. After Macromedia was purchased by Adobe, Director stayed desktop-focused while Flash dominated web interactivity and animation. The existence of the two programs within the same ecosystem allowed them to capitalize on each other’s design and affordances, to the point where Macromedia and Adobe would both have to clarify use cases for each given the substantial overlap between them. Eventually the ability to embed Flash content in Director further blurred the lines between the platforms.

The 1997 introduction of the Aftershock utility as part of Macromedia’s Universal Media initiative addressed the technical limitations of authoring a single experience for multiple platforms. The Universal Media initiative described the core aspiration of both Flash and Java for a singular input, universal set of target formats: With all of the available output alternatives, Director and Flash movies will now be able to be viewed by an unlimited audience (Macromedia, Inc. 1997). This was also a preview of initiatives to making Flash accessible to non-coders: just as the first version of Flash involved no conception of objects or scripting, Aftershock allowed for the immediate embedding of a finished Flash project into an HTML document without the user understanding the internal construction of either. Aftershock offered a graphic interface for immediate export. Macromedia was clearly aiming at reaching a broader range of amateur creators, who wanted to distribute immediately over the web. This set the foundation for the future, as Canter noted in an interview in 2004: The evolution of tools has brought us to the point where the entire business models are changing and the essence of what tools are has shifted from something a professional uses, to something everyone will need to know how to use . . . the content in our lives will get treated like content from Hollywood (MacManus 2004). Such a tool might expedite the work of a professional user, although the limitations were many and included page layout, as seen in the interface. Instead, these interfaces targeted amateurs more familiar with file management systems than programming.

Each version of Flash extended the platform’s capabilities and gradually integrated a scripting language alongside the animation framework of the timeline. The release of Flash 5 coincided with a big change in the authoring of Flash: ActionScript was now a programming language, and as such it could be attached to MovieClips, frames, and sprites. The syntax, or format and ordering of the language, also changed drastically. The language moved from the custom set of commands that are closer to the capabilities of the player to a more standardized language on which JavaScript is also based: ECMAScript. The slash syntax, which allowed authors to identify objects like a web address, remained in this version, as did the toolbox. Many programmers encountered Flash as a first programming environment after transitioning from the markup syntax of traditional web development. But Flash 5 was now recognizable even to developers bringing expectations from popular systems programming languages such as C or Java: a few key elements were adopted, including parameterized function calls and local variables that enabled higher-level organization of the code. These features enabled coders to reuse and organize their code. This was particularly relevant to games, which often share a great deal of functionality with other works in a genre. Flash 5 also included the first debugger, which allows programmers to see into the code’s state as it runs. Along with these changes to the language, ActionScript was moved from a specific subeditor in the interface attached to MovieClips into its own file extension, .as. This allowed programmers to use the same code in different projects and helps organize code based on functionality.

ActionScript’s introduction, however, also marked an acceleration of complexity as well as an increase in power. First under Macromedia and increasingly under Adobe’s ownership, the development of the platform moved away from the original intended purpose: a friendly authoring tool for not-quite-end users. Flash was instead split under market pressures between the needs of enterprise customers and the increasingly attractive mobile markets. The inexorable march of mobile would lead to Flash Lite, while the enterprise market birthed the Flex SDK, whose mission was to make creating relatively similar applications easier. While these tools leveraged the platform’s virtual machine, the original runtime provided developers with a means to bypass the turbulent demands of web standards.

Flash was, for the better part of the 2000s, the de facto standard for dynamic online multimedia. Canter described the philosophy behind multimedia as a rejection of arbitrary categorizations in art: We foresaw multimedia as a new art form to merge the medias together-so you could paint with the violin and make music with the paintbrush (MacManus 2004). The platform’s goals stayed consistent across owners and even through the expansion into enterprise and mobile. However, the accumulated difficulty in establishing a universal language for interactive and creative web experiences proved extraordinarily difficult. Other platforms tried to establish themselves as a universal, and some—including Java—offered similar portability but without the artist-friendly development environment that Flash featured. Flash was designed with professionals in mind, but it was co-opted by an amateur web, with users who in turn created resources and communities that steered the platform through experiments and creative works and into the current expectations for what multimedia experiences delivered on the web are capable of. As Flash’s influence has spilled out beyond the browser window, we can see the consequences of the platform’s styles and drawing tools everywhere from Cartoon Network to iPad games.

In our examination of Flash’s impact, we will be considering Flash as both a platform for developing and for distributing content. Flash refers primarily to Flash Player, which interprets the .swf (hereafter SWF, which originally stood for Shockwave Flash format but eventually was generalized to Small Web Format) file type. Most of those files are built using the primary Flash development environment,